


Blues fallin' down like hail

by sinfuldesire_archivist



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-23
Updated: 2006-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-03 15:18:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8718841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinfuldesire_archivist/pseuds/sinfuldesire_archivist
Summary: "He expects something momentous. Dean's waiting for the earth to crack open and spit his father back out at him. He imagined a dusty whirlwind rising up out of the street, pictured doubling over to keep it out of his eyes and his lungs." Warnings for incest, language, character death, and angst. AU of 2x08, "Cross Road Blues".





	

**Author's Note:**

> Note from the Sinful Desire archivists: this story was originally archived at [Sinful-Desire.org](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Sinful_Desire). To preserve the archive, we began importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in November 2016. We e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact us using the e-mail address on [Sinful Desire collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/sinfuldesire/profile).

**Blues fallin' down like hail.**  
SPN. Sam/Dean, R. 2,500 words. Warnings for incest, language, character death, and angst. AU of 2x08, "Cross Road Blues". Love love love to Kate because I know she's sick of me whining about this fic, but she pretends not to be anyway. ♥ Title from Robert Johnson.  
  
  
He expects something momentous. Dean's waiting for the earth to crack open and spit his father back out at him. He imagined a dusty whirlwind rising up out of the street, pictured doubling over to keep it out of his eyes and his lungs.  
  
There's none of that.  
  
The demon, the negotiator—she doesn't do so much as snap her goddamned fingers. She just tugs his face down and kisses him, and it doesn't taste or feel any different than just any old kiss. Her nails scrape the nape of his neck and when she lets him go, she just smirks up at him and says, "It's done."  
  
Dean says, "Wait. How do I—"  
  
Over her shoulder, she tells him, "They're waiting for you. Back at your motel." And then she turns, smiles in that coy, cat-with-its-food way she's been trying to sell him from the start, and she says, "I'll be seeing you, Dean."  
  
All Dean can think is that he's never met a bigger fucking cliché in his whole goddamned life.  
  
::  
  
Dean thought they'd seen the worst of it all late in the summer of oh-two. Sam walked into the kitchen while Dad was cleaning the guns and Dean was doing the dishes. He threw his acceptance letter on the table with a smack, and he announced loud and clear and practiced that he was leaving, and either Dad could give him the money for the bus ticket, or he could hitchhike his way out west. Sam was willing to go for either one, as long as it got him the hell out.  
  
That fight used to be their baseline: _This is as bad as it's gonna get. Never again._ Sam left and Dad never talked about it. Sam came back and Dean never talked about it. And around and around they go.  
  
But this. This is bigger than California. It's bigger than an envelope and a letter bleeding Sam's full name across the first line. Dean walks through the door of their room and there's at least ten minutes where none of them can think of a word to say.  
  
Sometime around minute twelve, it all explodes. And when it's over, when John's red-faced from yelling and Dean's shaking with the effort of staying quiet, they both collapse in their own ways. Dad storms out and goes for a drink, which is just so. So fucking _typical_ that it hurts Dean not to laugh.   
  
Sam's not used to being the outsider. He sat silent the entire time, and now he unfolds himself from the edge of the bed and goes to Dean, kisses his mouth and pushes one hand flat under Dean's shirt. He mumbles, "It's okay, it's okay," over and over, and he doesn't back away until his brother's trembling for completely different reasons.  
  
They pull apart to undress, and Dean can see Sam tempted to fold his clothes before they move to the bed and huddle under the covers.  
  
Sam, with his hand splayed across Dean's ribcage, kisses his brother's shoulder and says, "Evan's dead."  
  
Dean sighs. "Yeah. Figured. Sammy, can we not—"  
  
And Sam nods. He swallows once, some giant, invisible lump in his throat. "Yeah," he says. "We can."  
  
::  
  
The second year, they finally get Dad back to the Roadhouse.  
  
It's four days of the most awkward silences they've ever known until the storm breaks with yells and breaking glasses. They can hear it even outside, even sitting on the hood of the car. The three of them, Sam and Jo and Dean, they wait and listen and share one cigarette at time, but they go through at least six before it's over. Sitting and smoking and just waiting for the screaming to stop, it feels like being sixteen, like rebelling just because it's the thing to do. They almost remember.  
  
It ends with Ellen shooting John twice, once a graze on the arm, the other barely missing his leg. She drinks and curses while she bandages the wound herself, and she almost does it again when John starts to laugh and can't stop. She's halfway to her gun before she laughs, too.  
  
::  
  
They split up again for the first time in November, and that's when Dad calls to tell them that it's over. That yellow-eyed sonofabitch demon's dead, and it's all over. It's done.  
  
The fight that year is just Sam and John yelling and swearing. Something about together, something about safe. And Dean wonders when everything happened in the middle, and wonders why they're not happier than they are. This was their life's work.  
  
When it's done, Dad goes back to the room next door, and Sam crawls, still angry, into his brother's bed. The sex is like when they were younger, like before California. It's like Sam's fucking Dean for everything that just went wrong. For every word he wanted to get in but couldn't.  
  
::  
  
Mostly, after a while, it all goes back to business as usual. They hunt and they kill. They yell and they bleed and Sam threatens to leave every day and twice, maybe three times, he almost does. Dean checks his brother's bag for applications or bus tickets or whatever when Sammy's in the shower, and he's always so, so relieved when he gets to curse his own paranoia.   
  
They get a place in Pennsylvania, a farmhouse out in the countryside, and it's all like before. Dean and Sam still spar and practice while Dad watches and critiques. They clean the weapons together and eat canned food or drive-thru take out every day of their lives.   
  
When John's gone, Sam and Dean still forget about their work and their chores and fuck on every flat surface they can find. Dad goes on trips by himself and spends more and more time away, until they day he doesn't come back at all.  
  
It's not really like that. It's not a day or even a week where suddenly they panic. It's just them, lying in bed, Sam tracing sleeping circles across his brother's back with one hand. He mumbles, "When's dad coming back?" and Dean makes a movement like a shrug, but there's less effort involved.  
  
"He said tomorrow. Prolly next week. Dunno." And that's it. He smiles, pushes himself up on one hand and says, "C'mon. I wanna fuck you in the shower."  
  
::  
  
It takes a while. It's in the third month that Sam says quietly, "I don't think he's coming back, man. He won't answer his phone, and—"  
  
Dean hits him in the jaw and storms out. He drives back up the bumpy road seven hours later, drunk and bloody, looking like he just lost one hell of a fight. Sam's lying on the couch with a stack of papers.  
  
He's chewed his lower lip raw. "I called the hospitals," he says evenly. "Down where he was. They faxed—" He drops the pictures on the table. Morgue photos. And Dean punches through the wall.  
  
::  
  
A permanent address means they get the body back. It takes a while for the documents to clear, but they have a funeral. Sam insists.  
  
"Fuck the flaming pyre bullshit, man." He sits slumped over the kitchen table, rifling the pages of the journal. He can't keep his hands off it. "I want... I want to be able to visit him."  
  
Dean can understand that. Or at least, he can pretend to. He lets Sam have whatever closure he needs, and then he gets in his car without another word and floors it all the fucking way to Mississippi.  
  
At midnight, at the crossroads, there's nothing. The earth doesn't open up and there's no dirt tornado clouding his vision. He does the ritual, the summoning, with shaking hands, but none of it matters. She doesn't come. Dean can hear himself, yelling out loud at the empty roadways and the landscape, screaming himself hoarse about how she promised.   
  
They agreed on ten years. A lifetime and a reunion. He wasn't supposed to outlive his father.  
  
When his throat feels like it's bleeding and his mouth is too dry, he storms into the bar and orders a drink. The people all part like the goddamned Red Sea. Mostly, Dean's just surprised that no one called the cops on the crazy bastard yelling at nothing outside.  
  
Home, two days later, Sam burns the toast for breakfast and says, "Did you think it would work?"  
  
Dean shrugs. He bites into a charred slice of Wonderbread and swallows it dry, and Sam sighs and goes back to his coffee without any more questions.  
  
::  
  
In Sam's mind, it's some sort of trigger. Dad's dead, so now let's all worry about Dean instead. Let's put him in a fucking plastic bubble.  
  
Dean finally snaps on Sam's birthday. He throws a forkful of sheet cake and frosting at the wall and they yell until Sam breaks down. He cries, and Dean remembers other birthdays and other fights and it all feels so familiar and so far away.  
  
In that moment, Sam looks so young. His hair's even got some grey by now, but hunched over the table and crying on his birthday, Sam could be seven years old again.  
  
Sam slams his fist against the table to make it stop and he says, growls, " _We'll find a way to stop it_." He says it like it is: like it means more to him than Dean, and they both know it.  
  
Dean doesn't agree or say no. He just sits down.  
  
They go back to their cake.  
  
::  
  
That year makes Dean remember what it was like to be twenty-one. Sam spends all his time at the table with books and the laptop, research and desperation, his usual obsessive bullshit mentality of _there's an answer_. It's the same concentrated look he had on his face trying to understand calculus homework or quantum theory, and those were never Sam's areas of expertise. Way out of his league, every time.  
  
Dean stands behind his brother's chair and lets his fingers brush the nape of Sam's neck, dipping his head to whisper suggestions, some vivid details. The same words that used to make his brother drop everything, always.  
  
Tapping away at the computer, a pencil in his teeth, Sam waves Dean off with one hand. "Later, man," he mumbles. "M'working."  
  
"The fuck ever," Dean mutters, dropping his hands away. He gets to the door of the kitchen before Sam looks up.  
  
"Later," he says, more firmly, watching Dean's eyes. "This is _important_ , Dean." Like Dean doesn't know that. Like Sam's talking about a twelfth grade English paper and Dean just doesn't get it.  
  
"Yeah," he says. "Later."  
  
::  
  
Dean's hands clutch white-knuckled at the headboard and he moans with every move Sam makes. Fucking his brother from behind, one hand on Dean's dick, Sam keeps whispering in Dean's ear: "We'll find a way. I promise. I promise. When it comes, we'll, we'll—oh, _fuck_. Dean, we'll find a way to kill and we will. Both of us. We'll take it down together."  
  
"Yeah," Dean agrees, "Together." He pushes back against Sam, tightens his hands so the wood groans. "Shit, _shit_ , Sammy, come _on_." One hand comes down, covers Sam's so they can jerk him off together, and Dean breaks completely into incoherent little whimpers and sounds.  
  
Sam kisses the back of Dean's neck and tightens his hand, pushes his hips forward and back, finding the right angle. "Come on, baby," he says. "You and me. Together." And Dean whines deep down in his throat and comes all over their hands.  
  
::  
  
Year eight is bad, for both of them. There's the time a vision he has when he's grocery shopping lands Sam in the mental ward for a week. Concerned civilians hear him screaming for his brother in aisle five, and it takes six days to convince the doctors he's fine. They chalk it up to a seizure and let him go against their will.  
  
Year eight is when there's no answer, just stacks of books and papers and thousands of websites, thousands of crumpled hopes. Year eight is when Sam breaks down and dry-heaves at the foot of the toilet for an hour when Dean's out, because he doesn't know. He can't find it. He thinks, for the first time, _maybe there's nothing_. What if there's nothing at all.  
  
Year eight is when Dean goes on a hunt alone low in the Appalachians, and it's the night he falls asleep at the wheel. It's not as bad as it could be, 'cause he was driving pretty slow and he didn't hit the trees, just the ditch.  
  
When Sam maps the gash across Dean's forehead with his forefinger and his thumb and presses his lips into a thin line, when he says, "It's not so bad," Dean closes his eyes and nods. He does look at Sam, and he pretends his brother's just talking about the paint scratches and spider-cracked windshield of the car.  
  
::  
  
His brother dies in the last year. Year ten, Sam gets picked off by some low-level demon with a fucking lot of luck, but maybe not so much because Dean puts five silver bullets through its chest and skull three seconds later. Not that it fixes anything, because Sam's not moving. Sam's not breathing.  
  
The hospital pronounces him D.O.A. They clear the body out of the backseat of the car and they ask the questions. They apologize. Too many nurses walk on through and give him sad frowns, mumbling, _We're sorry, sir. No, there's nothing you could've done._  
  
An old woman looks up from papery hands clenched over the clasp of her purse and she gives Dean this knowing look, like experience, and she tells him, kindly, _Sometimes, it's just time, dear._  
  
Staring at her, Dean thinks that the good part—the only good part—is that he left his forty-five in the car.  
  
::  
  
Dean goes south. He finds the hotel closest to the crossroads and leaves the door unlocked. He draws no circles in salt or dust. He barely eats.  
  
The twelve days in that room, a week past the deadline, and all he does is drink himself useless and jerk off. He does it trying to recall his brother's hands and mouth, always coming frustrated and angry, yelling himself hoarse at the ceiling and the walls.  
  
The door's unlocked, but when it comes, the fucking dog tears it off its hinges anyway.  
  
His guns are still in the car. A bottle in hand, his eyes focus slow on the claw marks dragging their way into the floorboards, and he smiles. "The fuck took you so long, huh?"  
  
He hears it growl and jump, and he feels its weight and its claws. Dean doesn't yell or fight, but he shuts his eyes, then, 'cause that was the one thing he always knew—he didn't wanna be one of those corpses waiting with their eyes open to be found.


End file.
